inspired by zach lieberman inspired by zach lieberman inspired by zach lieberman zach lieberman

Most Blooket usernames are forgettable. A funny name changes that — it gets a reaction the moment it appears on the leaderboard, makes the session more memorable, and costs exactly zero effort to set up. Below is everything you need to pick one that actually lands. Top 50 Funny Names for Blooket This list covers wordplay, gaming culture, self-deprecating humor, and pop culture references. There’s something for every classroom energy. # Funny Blooket Name # Funny Blooket Name 1 Q...

Neutrinos have about as little influence as a particle can have. They have essentially no heft, no electric charge, and no “color” charge. As a result, the neutrino has no connection with most of nature’s forces; it can slip through whole planets and stars without striking a single atom. But neutrinos have proven more than capable of bending the life path of a scientist. In the late 1990s… Source Neutrinos have about as little influence as a particle can have. They have essentially no...

I stumbled across this great post by Spencer Mortensen yesterday, which tested different email obfuscation techniques against real spambots to see which ones actually work. It's a fascinating read, and I'd recommend checking it out if you're into that sort of thing. The short version is that spambots scrape your HTML looking for email addresses. If your address is sitting there in plain text, they'll hoover it up. But if you encode each character as a HTML entity , the browser still renders...

Why logging at every layer of a service produces noise, and how to log only at the handler level while propagating context from below. Why logging at every layer of a service produces noise, and how to log only at the handler level while propagating context from below.

The Artemis II launch, its four astronauts prior to liftoff, people cheering the launch, and the crew’s Orion spacecraft and its beautiful view of a crescent Earth. The flight crew from left to right: Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen , Pilot Victor Glover , Mission Specialist Christina Koch , and Commander Reid Wiseman . Images: NASA At long last, that moment is here. Humans have visited our Moon again, ending a five-decade absence since Apollo. Four astronauts launched by NASA on Ap...

I hope this update finds the weather starting to thaw out for you. This is just a quick update while I work on getting a new build ready for later this month. For this spring and summer, I am offering 3D print services for all of my builds. I am offering flat rate shipping to the US48, but if you need international shipping comment below and I can contact you with a shipping quote. All parts are printed in high quality matte black PLA. I usually only open up print windows once a year, so thi...

art002e000192 Hello, World , Image Credit: NASA/Reid Wiseman You may already have seen the above photo taken by Reid Wiseman on the Artemis II moon mission. For some of you it may conjure memories of another photo, The Blue Marble , taken by Harrison Schmitt during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972: AS17-148-22727 The Blue Marble , retouched by Wikipedia user Yann I’ve known that photo my whole life, but seeing it again last night sparked a curiosity about the other photos t...

I mostly link to written material here, but I’ve recently listened to two excellent podcasts that I can recommend. Anyone who regularly reads these fragments knows that I’m a big fan of Simon Willison, his (also very fragmentary) posts have earned a regular spot in my RSS reader. But the problem with fragments, however valuable, is that they don’t provide a cohesive overview of the situation. So his podcast with Lenny Rachitsky is a welcome survey of that state of world as seen throug...

This is the fifth post in my A-Z Toolbox series, in which I’m listing tools I use down the alphabet for no logical reason. The letter E is a tad more sparse than previous letters in this series, at least when it comes to tools I use. There’s the emacs family, but I might save that for my preferred MicroEmacs under the letter M . There’s Erlang that’s interesting for someone curious about functional programming, but I have only passing experience. I’m sure I’ll think of mor...

I was inspired by, of all things, a video monologue by a Scottish surfer [1] who said that the future for them was challenging themselves in new ways. My guitar was close by and I thought maybe I should give myself a bit of a challenge too. I picked up my guitar and looked up a tutorial on how to do finger picking. The first video I found was a bit challenging. I looked for another that was easier. The one I found was a tutorial showing how to play How did it end? by Taylor Swift, a song ...

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” ― The Lord of the Rings Dunedin is a former Scottish settlement, which becomes apparent after a quick walk through the city. The name is an anglicization of the Gaelic name for Edinburgh. It is counterintuitively pronounced /dɐˈniːdɘn/ (duh-nee-din). I arrived on a Saturday during the Chinese New Year Festival , so the city was full. In fact, there was not a single accommodation available in the entire...

I love sampling algorithms. Here's the sampling algorithm that I find most magical. We want to generate a subset of {1, 2, ..., n} of size k . def floyd ( n , k ): s = set () for i in range ( n - k + 1 , n + 1 ): t = random . randint ( 1 , i ) if t in s : s . add ( i ) else : s . add ( t ) return s I learned about this algorithm the canonical way all good algorithm lore ...

Six months after we standardized on OpenSearch, a pull request introduced Datadog into a service. The ADR existed. It had been discussed, approved, and stored in the repo. The PR was still green. That is architecture drift. Not because engineers are careless. Because memory does not scale across hundreds of people and dozens of repositories. After we started checking ADRs in CI, we caught several violations like this in the first month and dozens more in the first quarter before they reach...

In the previous post in this series , I wrote about a little utility I created for detecting underlined words in a book and creating vocabulary study material for them. Like I mentioned earlier, this was one of my earliest experiences with LLM-driven development, and I think it shaped my outlook on the technology quite a bit. For me, the bottom line is this: with LLMs, I was able to rapidly solve a problem that was holding me back in another area of my life . My goal was never to “produce so...

Welcome back to compiler land. Today we’re going to talk about value numbering , which is like SSA, but more. Static single assignment (SSA) gives names to values: every expression has a name, and each name corresponds to exactly one expression. It transforms programs like this: x = 0 x = x + 1 x = x + 1 where the variable x is assigned more than once in the program text, into programs like this: v0 = 0 v1 = v0 + 1 v2 = v1 + 1 ...

The war in Iran, and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has unfortunately made us all familiar with details of the petroleum supply chain that we could formerly happily ignore. Every day we get some new story about some good or service that depends on Middle East petroleum and the production of which has been disrupted by the war. Fertilizer production, plastics, aluminum, the list goes on. One such supply chain that’s suddenly getting a lot of attention is helium. Helium is produ...

Meta announced Muse Spark today, their first model release since Llama 4 almost exactly a year ago . It's hosted, not open weights, and the API is currently "a private API preview to select users", but you can try it out today on meta.ai (Facebook or Instagram login required). Meta's self-reported benchmarks show it competitive with Opus 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT 5.4 on selected benchmarks, though notably behind on Terminal-Bench 2.0. Meta themselves say they "continue to invest in are...

Today I’m very happy to share that Mario Zechner is joining Earendil . First things first: I think you should read Mario’s post . This is his news more than it is ours, and he tells his side of it better than I could. What I want to do here is add a more personal note about why this matters so much to me, how the last months led us here, and why I am so excited to have him on board. Last year changed the way many of us thought about software. It certainly changed the way I did. I s...

For-profit businesses weren’t the focus of the workshop I planned to create , but there is a lot to learn from the literature on how to shut companies down. See the entire series: Lessons from Disaster Management Lessons from MAID Lessons from Crisis Lessons from Business Organisational Decline Is Not a Single Event Whetten1980 argued that management science had almost entirely ignored organizational decline in favour of growth. WeitzelJonsson1989 extended this into a...

CMake has a --debugger mode since 3.27 (July 2023), allowing software to manipulate it interactively through the Debugger Adaptor Protocol (DAP), an HTTP-like protocol passing JSON messages. Debugger front-ends can start, stop, step, breakpoint, query variables, etc. a live CMake. When I came across this mode, I immediately conceived a project putting it to use. Thanks to recent leaps in software engineering productivity , I had a working prototype in 30 minutes, and by the end of that s...

While GitHub has been busy losing its last nine of availablility , I’ve been thinking about how the internet used to be. Not the internet people talk about from the 90s , but the internet that we used to have even 10-15 years ago. This was the heyday of startups like GitHub, Twitter, Airbnb, and, Google was in its prime (though likely slightly past it at that point - Linus’s git tech talk there was in 2007.) I’ve specifically been thinking about the Octocat Builder . GitHub create...

Here are the solutions to the problems I posted last week . Problem 1 A language \(L\) is commutative if for all \(u\), \(v\) in \(L\), \(uv = vu\). Show that \(L\) is commutative if and only if \(L\) is a subset of \(w^*\) for some string \(w\). The "only if" direction is surprisingly tricky. Answer For the "if" direction, suppose \(L \subseteq w^*\). Then every \(u, v \in L\) can be written as \(u = w^i\) and \(v = w^j\), so \(uv = w^{i+j} = vu\). For the "only if" direction, as...